634: Making CEO Time in Your Business
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What do you do when unexpected free time makes you anxious instead of relieved? We break down the difference between constant motion and true movement, introducing three kinds of time: Action, Admin, and CEO. WE explain why we often tie success to tangible, immediate tasks—and how that mindset keeps us stuck on the hamster wheel. Practical tactics follow: name the time, block the calendar, keep a CEO list, measure progress differently, and build in rest. The result is a framework to move from fear to focus and intentionally steer your business.
Main topics:
Motion vs. meaningful movement
Action, Admin, CEO time
Calendar blocking & CEO lists
Measuring progress beyond visits
Rest as strategy & creativity
Main takeaway: “Action time keeps the business running. Admin time keeps it organized. CEO time keeps it growing.”
If your days are packed with visits and emails, it’s easy to mistake motion for progress. Block CEO time on your calendar, keep a running “strategy list,” and track improvements to systems and margins—not just completed visits. Protect rest so your creativity can breathe; big ideas rarely show up when you’re exhausted. Your schedule should reflect your priorities—so make space for the work that actually moves you forward.
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Pet sitting, business owner, free time, CEO time, admin time, action time, client communication, strategic planning, business growth, work-life balance, time management, business strategy, entrepreneurship, business expansion, work-life integration.
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin
Meghan 00:01
Hi, I'm Meghan. I'm Collin. We are the hosts of pet sitter confessional, an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Thanks to pet sitters associates and our wonderful Patreon supporters for making today's show possible, we also want to thank you for listening. If you love the podcast. Want to keep it going, you can go to pet sitter confessional.com/support, to see a bunch of ways you can help out. Being a business owner, especially one in the pet sitting and dog walking industry, means that you don't have a lot of free time. So when you do find free time as a business owner, it can feel terrifying instead of relief. It often brings anxiety with it, nervousness. Ah, what am I supposed to be doing now? What should I be doing? Are there things that I need to be doing that I don't even know I should be doing in pet sitting? Most of us start by doing everything ourselves, the field work, the scheduling, the client communication, it's constant motion. Then we hire help. Maybe we're not very good at our website, so we need somebody to step in and rework it, or we've recently taken on a ton of clients, and we need an employee to help us out in the field, there's suddenly this shift that goes on. There are moments when you aren't walking dogs, not scooping litter boxes, have free time now that you were sending emails or working on the website, that you now have this space in your day and you're not rushing from visit to visit, that block of nothing can really feel overwhelming, because it forces us to confront the bigger question of, what should I be working on now? And rather, sometimes the question is, what should I be working on first, I know there's advertising and marketing and getting my name out there and client cultivation, making sure that I'm retaining clients and keeping my employees happy. There's so much to be doing. So we're going to talk about when that free time feels scary. How to value the different kinds of time in your business, the CEO time, the admin time, the action time, the in the field time, and how to start using open space in your calendar to grow and not panic when we first start our businesses. Everything is action. And this was true for Collin and I. We walk the dog, we scoop the litter, we write the report, we send the invoice, we follow up with the client, making sure they got home. Okay, it's non stop. We feel productive because we are moving all the time. There's constant action in our lives. We're drumming up business, we're talking to clients, we're advertising here, and we're going to networking here. We're putting on events and going to strategic partners saying, Hey, can we partner together?
Collin 02:26
Well, it's a no, never ending stream of dopamine hits, right? Your body's constantly be being rewarded by all the activities that you're doing, because it's all new, it's all exciting. It's all action all the time. You're always getting the client request, and you're handling that, and you're handling that, and you're meeting them, and you're knowing what's going on, and then you're you're doing the booking, and then you're doing all this like you it is non stop. And I think that's something that is we very rarely talk about, is just the constant motion that we are doing as a business owner, is that there's always one more thing we often joke right? Yeah, I quit my nine to five so I could work 24/7, because there's a never ending deluge of things that we are doing, especially in the beginning, because we're excited, we're energized, and there are a lot of things that take place quickly.
Meghan 03:14
But there is a difference between motion and movement. Motion is activity. It's busy work. It feels good, but it doesn't always move you forward. And we're not just talking about in the field work here, the actual dog walking and pet sitting, because yes, that is motion. That is movement, physical activity. But what we're talking about here is more busy work, as in, I have an event coming up, and I have to buy 500 pens in order to get them out,
Collin 03:41
and it takes the planning and the route planning and all that stuff and coordinating and scheduling all it's all of that work. I think that's what you're talking about here. Of it's not just the act of the dog walk, it's all of the other little ancillary things that come up throughout our day that keep our time and attention and hold that for
Meghan 04:02
us. While I feel like movement is direction, it is going somewhere, it's intentional action that grows your business of it could be going to the animal shelter or the Humane Society and talking about a partnership of how you can get more dogs adopted that will foster Goodwill for the community and your clients, that is movement that better aligns with your mission.
Collin 04:23
Well, as you said, it's intentional focus. It's you sitting down and basically planning out that next year, the next five years, and going, Okay, where do I want to be? And importantly, what are the steps that I believe are going to take me from where I am now to where I want to go, whether that is partnerships, whether that is rate increases, whether it is expansion or reduction of service areas. Well, again, whatever that is, it's you going. How do I get to point B? And the danger here is that when, when all that we know is the field work, motion, the day to day, busy. This, the day to day grind of route planning and driving and leashing up and picking up and picking up the poops and doing all this stuff. Would all we have that in our brain of the Go, go, go motion, because that gets comfortable to us. That's the stuff that we feel familiar with, that we go, oh, this is what I'm good at. Because, let's be honest, most of us get into this because we love animals and we love the physical activity of what we're doing. We love the dog walking. We love the in and out. We love the cats. That's what feeds us.
Meghan 05:27
We don't really get excited about trying to figure out the exact colors that our logo needs to be, or the fact that we need to buy frisbees for the event and which company do we go to, or how does my shirt design need to be in order to get most visibility
Collin 05:41
Right exactly. We don't sit down go, Okay, well, I've got an event coming up in two months. What are the things that I need to have in line, and the order dates and the in by dates to make sure that I hit these deadlines so they can show up at that event with everything that I need. That's kind of long term planning there. So when we move from the day to day busyness of the pet sitting visits and the cats and all that. When we move from that and go into the other times, the admin and CEO times that we're going to get into when we move into that, those times feel empty. They feel a little like we're not actually working and we're wasting our time, and we need to be doing the other stuff. But the in actuality here the other times, those are what create long term movement in our business. Because if all that we're doing is spinning our wheels just kind of grinding and grinding and grinding and grinding, we don't get anywhere. It takes that intentionality and focus to move us forward.
Meghan 06:38
And so we feel that there are really three different kinds of time, the first one being action time. And this is the field work. This is why we got into it, the puppy Cuddles, the kitty kisses, the walking, the feeding, the cleaning, the reporting. It's immediate. It's tangible. It's client facing. It's pretty easy and comes pretty naturally for most of us, because that's what we do. That's what we've always done in this business.
Collin 07:02
Well, you touched on two things. There it is, both immediate and tangible. Two huge things. It's immediate. We get that immediate hit of dopamine. We get that immediate satisfaction. We get that immediate motion that we're doing. We're actually moving something, doing something here, and it's tangible. I can touch the dog. I can look at the steps that I've taken. I can look at the report. I can count the number of photos that I have. It seems very real to us. Our brains want to latch on to the real things that it gets a lot of us excited. I know, for me, like to see tangible work, to feel that, to know that, to see an impact that I've made in the world, it's very satisfying and extremely gratifying to do, which is why that this action time is so like we get, we have a hard time pulling ourselves out of that. I know a lot of times we may say, Well, I don't want to stop doing that action time, because I don't think anybody else can do it as good as I can. And I think if we're also honest with ourselves, we would have to say, I don't want to stop doing the visits, because they're really satisfying to me. They really feed me in what I want to be doing and why I started this. And so just to stop doing those times, to stop doing those things, means that I start to struggle with whether I'm connected and happy with my business at all, because it means that I'm directing my time and attention to other things, away from the things that gave me those immediate dopamine hits and made me happy.
Meghan 08:31
And that's why a lot of times, we tie our success to these metrics of okay, I did 18 dog walks this week, and last week I only did 16. So I am more successful this week than I was last week. Or I completed the visits all on time. I was I was great. I never missed a visit. I was never late this week. I reported everything, or even our revenue, because I did more visits this week, I was making more money, and therefore I am more successful. It is easy when you see the real world benefits of your actionable items to go, oh, wow, I am more successful. And that's why it feels so gratifying. Because there can be times when we say, I did 18 dogs walks this week last week, I only did 16. So I am now happier, if
Collin 09:13
we're honest with ourselves, many of us would rather say, Yeah, I did. I did more dog walks this week than last week. Instead, we might say, well, last week I did 20 dog walks, but this week I only did 16. But in that time where I was doing the other dog walks, I was working on my admin time, I was I was scheduling, I was bookkeeping, I was doing emails or running payroll. This is the necessary work of our business, it's required to keep our business moving and fluid and doing what it needs to be done, but it's not always exciting, right? Nobody's like, Ah, yes, I am not doing dog walks today, but I get to do all of my bookkeeping, hooray? Or everyone's favorite, taxes, right? I. I prepared for taxes this week. And what's what's interesting is is, as with the the field, or as the action time increases, so too does the admin time, the admin time required to do the commensurate increase of the action time, it goes through the roof, because now I'm not juggling the needs of 10 clients. I'm juggling the needs and requirements and specificity of 100 clients. That's way more overhead that we have to take on. And this is where we start to feel that tension of i i want to be doing these visits, but in order to do these visits, well, I have guys do a lot of planning and coordinating and scheduling and all of these other things that pull my attention away from that action time.
Meghan 10:44
And I would say even more than tension, I would say a hamster wheel is often what it feels like, because it's like, well, I'm doing more visits, and I can't get off this hamster wheel, because as I do more visits and I have more admin time, I have more scheduling, more route planning that I have
Collin 10:58
to do. Yeah, even more so whenever you add team members, now your admin time is has now what I don't know quintupled in what you're required to do, because you're dealing with people and their schedules and their training and their oversight in all of those things as well. And so when we and I'm so glad you brought up, Meghan about the satisfaction of what we've tied our success to. Because now, when we look at our weeks, if we have team members and we're growing our business, we can look at the proportion of time that we spend in doing action items versus admin time. And look, man, 95% of my time is doing admin work. And is that really
Meghan 11:35
worthwhile? That's not exactly what I signed up to be doing, right?
Collin 11:39
And it can feel like we're not actually working because we're not actually doing revenue generating stuff.
Meghan 11:45
And if you feel like that is oppressive, just wait till you get to the third kind of time, which is CEO time. That's where you vision, you plan, you strategize, you grow, you do the 30,000 foot view of where is the entire company going. How do I steer the ship in the right direction? What do what waters do we need to be navigating in order to get there? Where do I want this business to be in one year? Five years, 20 years. What systems do I need to have now that do I need to put in place now to support that future business? Yeah, this
Collin 12:18
is where you really go. How do I make sure that my business is not the same now in five years, in 10 years, and Meghan, like you said, it's not just vision casting and saying, Well, I I wish and I hope and I I wonder upon a star that will be bigger than no, it's actually sitting down going, Okay, if I want to be 10x where I am right now, what would my systems look like? Let me start planning those out. Let me start designing those. Let me start looking at hiring. Let me start looking at who I can bring in and make these really good and amazing. And that time is the time where, and even if, I will say, even if you don't have employees, you're okay, you're gonna be a solo operator, fantastic. You still need the CEO time to make sure that how your operations are going are what they need to be doing, so that you can be running a fantastic business. But when we don't value admin time wait, we really don't add c value CEO time, because now we're not actually working on business function. And again, that's where this is completely separated. Action time and admin time are both functions of the business. CEO time is set apart and removed from that to then drive direction and purpose, and that takes us away from that true like what we value, okay, man, I'm not generating revenue by sitting here and thinking about an SOP, but what we have to realize is what we're actually doing is building a much more robust system so that by it, by the time it flows from us and our creation of the SOP through the admin time down into the action time, it's excellent and amazing and way more efficient and serving our clients better than ever.
Meghan 14:01
Collin and I do this all the time in our business, when an employee has a question that they feel is very innocent, but is is more of a 30,000 foot view question. If an employee comes to you with a great plan or idea that they want to see put out in the business, you may have to take them along that journey from going, Okay, this is an idea, and potentially this is how it could work in the business. But here are all of the logistics behind the scenes. Thing that because you're an employee, that you don't see, and it's not your job to see. But here we're going to peel back the curtain a little bit and say, here's why this potentially may not work out. Of course, we want our employees to have great ideas and come to us with things, but not everything can truly be workshopped and implemented.
Collin 14:46
I think that's a really good real world example of what CEO time looks like. If you are listening to this and you've ever had somebody come to you and say, Hey, why don't you just XYZ? Be or maybe you, you very well meaning, you went to some friends or family or other business owners and you were talking about a problem that you were facing in your business, and they said, Oh, well, you definitely need to do, you know better. You you should do radio marketing. Or have you tried TV ads? Or what about billboards and and you start to really pin down and go, Well, that doesn't work because this and this is kind of different. And here's how my business operates. That is CEO time. That is you strategically looking at options and parsing through what will work and what will not work. And we don't label that as CEO time most of the time, but this is a very like, oh, this situation come up. Let me plan through this. What we're talking about here is going you have dedicated time for the dog walks and cat sitting visits. You have admin time that's required of that we need to be dedicating time throughout our day and our week to the CEO time to be doing that kind of strategic planning.
Meghan 15:55
Yeah, the challenge really is to start treating that CEO time as equally valid and valuable as the other two, even though we don't see immediately the tangible benefits of the CEO time or even the admin time. Sometimes we send off an email to a potential client and we don't hear back right away or at all. We don't necessarily see the benefits of that
Collin 16:18
well, the CEO time is definitely the least urgent feeling of them, until it isn't right, until the major issues come up or major things start to impact you, how your business operates. But we've just removed ourselves the action items. Action time is in the field. It's immediate, immediate, responsive. You still get that with the admin time, but the CEO time, when we're talking about five years down the road, 10 years down the road all this planning, it feels like it's not important, because it's not urgent to us, but in reality is things come up all the time that make it urgent. I mean, the biggest thing that we see things like, Oh, you need a lot of CEO time when all of a sudden you're where you're living, increases the minimum wage. Well, that takes CEO time to now plan and stretch do strategic work around how to make your business operations work. Or maybe moving from independent contractors to employees, that's nothing but CEO time as you look at how you move your operations.
Meghan 17:16
Or maybe you had a major business leave your area a major manufacturing hub that just up and left their headquarters and moved to a different city. Well, if you had a ton of clients from that business, you will need that CEO time to figure out and strategize. Strategize is what we say sometimes, how to navigate the new waters. Yeah. Now a word from our friends at pet sitters associates as a pet sitter, you know how much trust goes into caring for someone's furry family member, but who has got your back for over 25 years, pet sitters Associates has been helping pet care pros like you with affordable, flexible insurance coverage, whether you're walking dogs, pet sitting or just starting out. They make it easy to protect your business. Get a free quote today at pets@llc.com as a listener, you get $10 off your membership when you use code confessional at checkout. That's pets@llc.com because your peace of mind is part of great pet care.
Collin 18:05
Because CEO time can appear so unstructured, right? They're not visits on a calendar and they're not emails to be responded to. It's us basically sitting down and thinking and planning. It can look like there's a bunch of free time, like there's a bunch of empty blocks on our calendar, and this can start to make us feel uncomfortable in in our days and in our weeks. And there's actually several reasons for this,
Meghan 18:29
much like I talked about the action items with the success that we feel, we are also conditioned to equate busyness with value. If we aren't busy, we feel like we're failing. We feel like we need to be doing more. We are not as successful. It's kind of innate in us to just constantly be doing, doing, doing, especially in today's world where everything is instant gratification. You can get a Starbucks coffee to your house through an Amazon drone in like two hours. So why would I want any free time at all? I'll just stuff it with other things.
Collin 18:59
You're right. We just we stuff and stuff and cram and cram everything into our schedule, and then to say, well, if I'm so busy running around doing visits and so busy doing scheduling and admin work and emails that I don't have time, what we end up with no time to just sit and think, to sit and ask ourselves, do I like what's going
Meghan 19:20
on? Do I enjoy my business? Am I
Collin 19:23
happy with things? What direction do I want to be going? What needs to be different? What is breaking around me? We don't have that time, and that's what CEO time gives us, is the ability to carve out just however much time you can, 510, 15, an hour a day and ask those deep questions about how things are going, but because we're not running on the hamster wheel, we're sitting down with some coffee or some tea a blank notebook or our computer pulled up to a Word document and going, Okay, let me start thinking about. Things, and doing an assessment of this, and really going more from feelings and emotions and gut about things, you can pull data and run reports and all that good stuff, but just asking, what would I want to be different?
Meghan 20:13
But sometimes that is uncomfortable to deal with. The answer of that I don't want to sit in the fact that I don't really enjoy my business anymore. I would just kind of rather suffer in silence, or sometimes suffer out loud, and just keep very loudly, keep going how it's going, because I don't know how to change things, or I don't know what to do. So I'll just keep running the hamster wheel until I fall off.
Collin 20:38
Well, it certainly exposes a lot of uncertainty in us. Uncertainty in, am I doing this the right way? Uncertainty in Am I moving in a good direction? Because it doesn't always have a clear checklist for us to do. It's big picture thinking, which feels intimidating because it's open ended questions. There's we pet sitters are some of the most detailed people on the face of the planet. We have to be. It's required by our clients. It's what sets us apart and what helps us make sure that we are doing what our clients need us to do. And so we are checklist people tend to be, Hey, you tell me to do X, Y, Z, I will do X, Y Z in the best possible way. And blow you away with this. We then look at our CEO time where it's, oh, there are no checklists.
Meghan 21:30
Yeah. It's more like, Okay, I'm at x right now and I want to go to y, but there's nobody telling me how to get from x to y and then to Z after that, in 10 years,
Collin 21:41
do I want to go to Z, why not? You know some other place exactly. There's no set course, which? All of a sudden, now we're really going, oh my goodness, the world is big. The options are infinite, and I don't know A, which one is the best option or not. But also B, what do I want? What do I want out of this? And is what I want, good or bad? So it is all of a sudden, becomes a reflection on us and our priorities and what we want out of it.
Meghan 22:17
And because it's so open ended, it requires choice free time forces us to decide what actually matters again, going from x to y, I don't know how to get there, and the choices are endless, like you just said, so I have to choose. Okay, well, I think in my best judgment, that in order to go from x to y, I should do these five things. And I guess that's the whole point of entrepreneurship, isn't it? It's we get to make the choices, and we chose this life. Nobody is telling us what to do, and so we love that freedom aspect, but sometimes it can be scary.
Collin 22:49
I feel like a lot of us can fall into the manager CEO trap of I started my business. I'm running my business, but I'm really just managing it. I'm really just managing it through this, through the admin time and through the action time. That's all I'm doing. I'm just here to maintain, you know, status quo, put out the fires and make sure everything just kind of goes okay. It's when we put on our CEO hat, where we step away from that we distance ourselves from the chaos, where we can start making those personal choices about what actually matters, because that's what this is, if you ask, and if you're listening to this, really ask yourself, what do I want out of my business? Ask yourself, what do you want out of your business? Because that will determine your next steps. That will determine and guide your next actions. And most of us, if we're honest, we didn't. We never asked ourselves, what do I actually want out of this? Do you get training? Do you hire Do you do you expand service areas? Do you do this? Do you do that? No one can tell you the right answer. You have to start with what you actually want, and then go from there. And then we removed the entire blueprint. There's no copy and paste for how you run a business, because it's based on what you want to do.
Meghan 24:07
It's so much harder than just following a to do list. But also, take heart. This is not a Debbie Downer conversation. Millions of entrepreneurs have done this before you, and millions will do it after you. So take heart. You are not alone, exactly.
Collin 24:19
That's But Meghan, you said, That's the amazing part. We get to say, okay, I can do anything with this. What do I want to do now and actually make impactful decisions and changes to move you there, instead of existing as a manager and just kind of throwing your hands up and going, well, I don't know. I guess I'm just kind of along for the ride going, Oh well, I don't like this. Oh, cool. I can actually make things change so that I'm not here anymore. But this discomfort of what we're talking about, the struggle here, it's actually a signal that you are growing when we struggle with the busyness and the value and the uncertainty and the choices. It means that you've shifted from working in your business. To on your business from become, from being a manager of the chaos to being a CEO of the direction that you're going.
Meghan 25:06
When you do get this free time in your business, it is so important to use it wisely, to make the time as productive as possible, not paralyzing, not just staring at a blank wall or a blank page going, I don't, I don't know what to do. So some things to help with that first name, the time block your calendar with CEO work so it feels intentional, not accidental. Make an appointment with yourself. If you just had Rosie move away and you walked her every, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, from two to three. Or if Rosie is now on your new employee's walking schedule, you now have that free time block to put in CEO time into your calendar.
Collin 25:43
But if you're not intentional, all of a sudden, you just have this blank space. And you end up wandering around your house going, well, I don't know what to do now. I used to be walking a dog right now, and I'll just, I don't know, go dust something or go sit back down and wait for something to happen. And it's that, is that, I guess I'll just wait for something to happen. You just start to go, No, I can do something with this. So you have your your pet time, you have your admin time. And then now, when you get that free time, label it CEO time. So that's time that you're giving yourself to actually plan. And when you see it on there, right? You're making that with yourself, and you're gonna it's easier to commit when it's
Meghan 26:18
named Well, in that way, also you don't start stuffing it with other things, like, oh, I don't know, scrolling on Tiktok or Instagram, or catching up with friends on Facebook. And while that is important, catching up with friends, you probably need to be doing some 30,000 foot view in your business, which is why you should create a CEO list. Keep a running list of strategy level tasks, updating your client contract, researching new services, analyzing profit margins, running more of your numbers and doing spreadsheets to figure out, are you on the right track? Are you in the direction that you should be going, or do you need to steer it somewhere else,
Collin 26:52
doing more market research, looking at other resources that you have in your area, other networking opportunities, that kind of research level. Hey, what am I working with? What? What are the major industries where I live and where I am wanting to conduct these services, and how do I partner with it? Like it's, it's that kind of focus where you are now able to go. Here is a list that I have that, okay, I've got 10 minutes. Let me look at my CEO to do list and do some things on there.
Meghan 27:20
And it's also working through the trickle down impacts of a change that you might make. Okay, your stages raise minimum wages. How does that impact with the services that you have, how much you charge the client segment you are needing to go after, the partnerships that you're wanting to have, the advertising that you need to make all of that. It's like a It's a spiderweb, basically, of like, okay, I want to change one thing. How does that impact the rest of everything that my business does?
Collin 27:47
Yeah, it gives you that time to think about those impacts. Maybe you're talking with a realtor friend, because that's part of your CEO time. I'm going to check up how realty is doing in my area, and you find that home prices are going through the roof and that the average day on the market is also expanding in your area. How might that impact the likelihood of growth in certain areas of where you're trying to serve, or the kind of clientele that you're trying to attract? Or maybe it's you going, Okay, if I want to attract this kind of person, where, when, how, why? What would that look like to bring them in? You don't get that kind of time if you're crammed full. And so having that on a set list of okay, I on my co list. I know every quarter I'm going to be checking in on XYZ, the high level, 30,000 foot things, and then I can go about the rest of the things that I need to do in my business. It is
Meghan 28:31
important to start small, though. How do we eat an elephant one bite at a time? Use 30 minutes to brainstorm, or 15 minutes, if you have it, read industry articles. Figure out what's going on in your local market. Talk to your chamber of commerce. How's the job market? How are businesses doing? Are they starting to shut down and close their doors? Or are they is your community thriving and opening tons of new small businesses? CEO time doesn't always mean huge projects. It's also thinking about the minutia, the details of the impacts a decision may
Collin 29:01
make. Or you could listen to a podcast, I don't know, make that part of your CEO time. Read a book better yourself. Take a class about how to be a better leader or better marketer. Learn a little bit more about SEO. That is the kind of thing that we're able to do in these small chunks,
Meghan 29:16
because CEO time is not tangible, like a dog walk is, or report writing. You need to measure your progress differently, instead of checking off visits, track the systems, track the ideas, the improvements that you put into place. This will be critical. So you don't say, in a month after doing CEO time, well, I don't know what I've done, and it feels like all the waste, and I still don't have any more clients, or I'm not moving in this right direction. You can go back and and kind of like a journal, you can go back and check, Hey, I am actually doing things that matter, that are important. And it might take a while for me to see the progress, but it is there. Yep, I look at,
Collin 29:48
look at the percent increase in profit margins that I had in my business, or look at the increase in percent revenue that I brought in from certain you know, marketing things that I'm doing. You only know that kind of data through CEO time. I think oftentimes we throw those kind of calculations into just admin time, but admin time is really the management of oversight of your operations, not the trajectory of your business, not doing an analysis of data and what you're working on. You only know that movement if you know where to look and how you're tracking things,
Meghan 30:18
but you also must build in time to rest. You have to allow yourself to rest. You can't keep stuffing your time, even when it comes to CEO time. CEO time sometimes looks like taking a walk, because rest is where Big Ideas surface. I know a lot of times people have big ideas in the shower, so maybe it's taking a 15 minute shower, and you normally get everything done in eight but you need that extra time to just think, not have your phone on, you not have extra distractions, but just stand there and let the water run over you and think deeply about things,
Collin 30:48
because you're not being pulled in a million different directions. When you are resting, your brain heals itself. Your body comes back down from its high highs or its low lows, and comes down to homeostasis, which means that we're living in not we're existing in an unstressed situation, which is where we want to be. Because when we are stressed, when we're chronically driven and we're chronically on edge, you don't get creativity. And CEO time is all about the creativity. It's all about, Yeah, show the cliche thinking outside the box, but it's having a fresh set of eyes on your business and the problems that you're facing or the opportunities that you have before you and you don't get that freshness, you don't get that alertness and creativity when you are dragging. So rest and really protect that time when you can rest.
Meghan 31:36
The goal is not to fill every moment with busyness again, Stop stuffing. Time. I am guilty of this as anybody, but Stop stuffing your time. We need to use our time with purpose. That's how we move from this fear to this focus. The action. Time keeps the business running. The admin. Time keeps it organized. The CEO, Time keeps it growing. When your free time shows up, don't panic. Mark it on your list. You know that you have an invitation with yourself to step into that CEO role,
Collin 32:06
and that's important too. Of many times our schedules, they're unpredictable. Or when we're just getting started into this of expanding into some CEO time, we don't always have it on a regular or reoccurring basis. So when you get that cancelation, when something pops up, or when you're not as busy as you thought you'd be, that's whenever you now block that out. You make sure that you've got that CEO list of and I will tell you on that CEO to do list should always be rest, and we talked about that, but you've got to have that on there so we don't forget, because we're really good at forgetting. Make sure you're resting and then asking these questions and giving intention to your business this
Meghan 32:43
week. Look at your schedule. Where do you have even 30 minutes of free time? Label it as CEO time, and then, instead of defaulting to busyness, use it to step back and ask, where is my business headed? Where do I want it to go? What's one thing I can do today to guide it there? Growth doesn't happen by accident. It happens when we make space for it. We are intentional with it. Thank you for listening to this episode. We greatly appreciate it. We would also like to thank pet sitters associates for sponsoring this episode, and we will talk with you next time bye.
